Saturday, 9 August 2014

Liberal Apologetics for Israel in the Huffington Post

As the daily
death toll rises in the Gaza Strip, the liberal apologists for the
crimes of the state of Israel on appear to be thinner ground. The
scale of the tragedy of Operation Protective Edge looks set to not
only exceed, but dwarf that of the last Israeli massacre of Operation
Cast Lead, in which 1,400 Palestinians, including 300 children were
killed, and some 5,300 injured – the majority of which were
civilians. Those seeking to justify Israeli crimes in these instances
usually fall back on the nonetheless benign intentions of the Israeli
state, generally found in the expression of abstract principles about
democracy. In doing so, they manage to perform impressive feats of
intellectual acrobatics to ignore what representatives of the Israeli
state actually say about their own intentions and goals.

I’ve
already mentioned that IDF commanders have referred to Operation
Protective Edge as a standard “shock and awe” tactic designed in
part to erode Hamas' support and weaken Palestinian morale, and this
is something which was very much at play in Operation Cast Lead, too.
In Cast Lead, IDF soldiers were given specific instructions as to how
much regard for the right to life of Palestinians the average soldier
was to have in conducting warfare in a built-up occupied territory
[emphasis added]:

“You
don’t see a terrorist there [in the house]? Fire at the window. It
was real urbanwarfare.
This is the difference between urban warfare and a limited
confrontation. Inurban
warfare, anyone is your enemy. No
innocents. It was simply urban
warfare inevery
way. . . . They kept repeating to us that this is war and in war
opening fire is not restricted. . . . our brigade commander at least
once . . . went so far as to say this was war and in war as in war,
no consideration of civilians was
to be taken. You shoot anyone you see.”

That’s
testimony from Breaking the Silence – an NGO which describes itself
as “an organization of veteran combatants who have served in the
Israeli military since the start of the Second Intifada and have
taken it upon themselves to expose the Israeli public to the reality
of everyday life in the Occupied Territories”. On Operation
Protective Edge, the founder of the organisation and former IDF
soldier Yehuda Shaul had the following to say:

“One
of the biggest lies of this operation and Cast Lead is that we’re
doing everything to avoid civilian casualties. When you use artillery
in a place like Gaza you can’t say you are taking every precaution.
It’s not the case that generals are looking to kill more civilians,
far from that. But we are far away from the official line that
everything is being done to avoid civilian casualties.”

I’m
of the perhaps unfashionable opinion that it doesn’t matter a damn
whether the general of an occupying force pours himself a whiskey at
the end of an evening, wipes the sweat away from his brow, and
wonders if that artillery which hit a UN-run school should have been
fired. The point is that there was still an unjustifiable attack on
civilians, rather than whether the general was upset at the end of
it. What matters is level of predictability and scope, and it takes a
great deal of mental acrobatics to see the sheer scale of the
atrocities committed in Gaza and to arrive at the conclusion that the
Israeli military, in anything besides interviews and PR, concerns
itself greatly with the lives of Palestinian civilians. Statements
like the ones above merely corroborate what the average cynic would
have suspected all along.

Liberal
apologetics in the Huffington Post

A
rather silly bit of apologia on the Huffington Post has been doing
the rounds by a writer called Ali A. Rizvi, which asks that we
consider 7 things before we pick a side in the “Middle East
Conflict” (I think he means the Israeli assault on Gaza). The
writer begins by claiming he’s been “accused” of being
pro-Palestinian, though I'm not sure where – presumably some
ultra-rightist on Twitter. A quick look through his post history
shows him to be a new atheist who has devoted column inches to the
supposed “myth” of Islamophobia whilst writing profiles of Ayaan
Hirsi-Ali, who has in the past described Islam, a religion of over
one billion adherents, as a “destructive, nihilistic cult of death”
and who has called for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to
receive the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the current assault on
Gaza which has killed over 400 children at time of writing. I will
leave the reader to decide upon the author’s professed neutrality,
based on the intellectual company he keeps. Now, onto the substance,
such that it is.

The
first point made in the piece is a typical trope pulled out by IDF
and Likud apologists, that it is wrong for the weight of
international opinion to bear down so heavily on Israel, because
there are more people dying in other conflicts. The big question mark
placed at the end of this is the supposition of closet anti-semitism
on the part of Israel’s critics. The author writes: “If I were
Assad or ISIS right now, I'd be thanking God I'm not Jewish.”

However, there was a great deal of international outcry about the conflict in Syria, and the UK even had a vote in Parliament on whether or not to go to war over it. With the Islamic State, condemnation and outrage at the actions of the group is there in droves. It’s
really possible to be in two places at once on these things. What’s
perhaps a more important distinction is that the conflicts in Iraq
and Syria represent an internal armed conflict – otherwise known as
a civil war. Israel’s acts against Gazan civilians represent the
acts of an occupying power against a civilian population. Under the
Geneva Conventions, Israel has a greater responsibility towards the
Palestinians than Assad has towards the Free Syrian Army or the other
thousands of resistance groups that have cropped up in the conflict.
The outrage against Israel for its actions, therefore, can be
defended as an expression of a consistent principle of international
law..

Aha
– the author says - the Israeli occupation of Gaza ended in 2005
with the unilateral withdrawal of troops! Israel is no longer
occupying Gaza since its troops left and has not done so for nine
years, so it cannot be said to be bound by the laws of occupation!
This point is completely bogus, since the laws of occupation don’t
refer simply to “boots on the ground”, but to the exercise of
effective control over the area. The UN, which is the most relevant
authority in this case, still considers Gaza to be occupied. The only
people arguing that the 2005 troop withdrawal constitutes an end to
the occupation (which Israel has argued isn't even an occupation, so
how could it end?) is the Israli government itselfand
it's not for individual states to dictate principles of international
law to the international community. Occupation doesn't refer merely
to troop presence but to exercise of “effective control” over an
area, which is quite a complex legal principle, but Opinio Juris has
a pretty good post on it here as a useful primer.

The Huffington Post piece, as of writing,
has been shared nearly 50,000 times on Facebook, which suggests that
some people are likely going to be persuaded by this sort of
propaganda masquerading as moderated reason. Elsewhere, the author
asserts that the conflict can be explained by the religious beliefs
of the adherents, and points to a few quotes from Jewish and Islamic
scripture to make his point, but it's an idealist point that should
be rejected outright by anyone wanting anything besides a
surface-level understanding of issues in the Middle East. Jews and
Muslims live peacefully together just fine in other parts of the
world. It's the interjection of Sykes-Picots and Balfour Declarations
creating arbitrary borders in the Middle East that leads to conflict.
It's true that the rhetoric
used in these conflicts is often religious, but the overriding
history of the Israel/Palestine conflict is one of politics, both
local and geo-.

We
are also told to ask ourselves exactly why Israel would deliberately
want
to kill civilians; the thrust of the point being that Israel should
actually be commended rather than condemned for its conduct, because
of the firepower it possesses and the capability for it to actually
completely annihilate the population of Gaza if it wanted to means
that the fact it hasn't demonstrates its high regard for civilian
life. Of course, we could extend the very same point to a country
like North Korea, which could, if it wanted to, simply shoot all of
the 200,000 people it has in its concentration camps. The DPRK, then,
should be commended for keeping its political prisoners alive. I just
watched Vice's excellent documentary on ISIS – in which an ISIS
fighter politely tells a man to get his wife to change the fabric on
her veil. He could have beheaded her right there and then – so
should he be praised for his exercise of restraint?

It's
necessary to combat these sorts of predjdices, because they have a
tendency to skew perspectives towards favouring a brutal occupying
power at the expense of understanding of the issues. The election of
Hamas as the dominant legislative power in the Occupied Territories
was a goldmine for supporters of Israel – at last they could have
confirmation that the Palestinians are inherently genocidal
anti-semites. Let's ignore the fact that in the years before Hamas
had far less popularity, or that Islamism was itself heavily fundedby Israel in the 80s to erode Fatah support.
All that matters is that we're able to paint the Palestinians as a
one-track minded, genocidal “other”, evidenced by the victory of
Hamas.

Of
course, there are some elements of the piece which pay lip service to
the crimes of Israel, and at the end of the piece the author rather
confusingly calls upon Israel to end the “occupation” which he'd
earlier on argued didn't exist since 2005. That said, the overall
tone is one of sympathy for and rationalisation of the occupiers and
vilification of the Palestinians. Those of us, meanwhile, who value
consistency and facts in our continued desire to understand these
issues, would do well to leave this sort of thing well alone.